When he traveled westward on his promotional caravan this spring, Conan O’Brien said he was trying hard not to overthink what he would do as host of the venerable “Tonight Show.”

Concentrating on not overthinking: a perfect contradiction. Classic Conan.

He works very hard to appear at ease. That’s part of his charm. He is rigorously lackadaisical.

It’s apparent in the studied anti-intellectualism. The pretense of cluelessness that this one-time Harvard Lampoon president wears like a badge of honor.

It’s the awkward way he inhabits his outsized body. When he does physical shtick, he’s amazing. When he tries to maintain a comfortable pose, his gawky limbs and goofy hair give away his anxiety.

When asked how weird it is that, starting Monday, he will be doing late-night comedy at an unhip hour in this time zone (10:30 on KUSA- Channel 9), he acknowledges the oddness, then turns it into a joke. A “Lord of the Rings” joke, at that.

Conan the outsider, Conan the nerd, Conan the Pale Force, now an alien in sunny Los Angeles — he’s the opposite of Johnny Carson.

Really, where else could he take the “Tonight Show,” which reached its cool zenith under Carson and its blue-collar all-American reliability under Leno? Take it to the land of irony, and peer at the workings of the entertainment world from an alien perspective.

As such he may be the leader of a growing pack of geeks who are succeeding on the fringe. Alton Brown. (His Food Network series “Good Eats” features him rigging home-made gadgets that work as well as expensive culinary devices.) Chelsea Handler. (Her “Chelsea Lately” on E! is a sarcastic cult favorite; she’s made it into the mainstream as a semi-regular correspondent on Leno.) You might even put Kathy Griffin in that category. (The self-described D-Lister now eclipses some of the “stars” she knocks.)

These are people whose cache relies on their not being what was formerly expected of a TV star.

They are not Carson cool.They’re not even Kimmel/Fallon/Ferguson cool. They capitalize on their nerdiness. And Conan fits among them.

A hint of the outsider irony to come: The backdrop for “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” is an amalgam of New York and L.A. landmarks that makes no geographical sense, but telegraphs “late- night showbiz!”

Conan has told observers to expect a good deal of “produced comedy,” or taped pieces. Having a studio on the Universal lot is an extra gift — the staff has banked bits about the studio’s tram tours featuring the “Jaws” shark, the Bates Motel set. Conan regularly quotes Johnny Carson’s 1993 advice as the best he’s received: “Just be yourself.”

Even as he aims for that practiced nonchalance, he knows he’ll face a barrage of instant reviews on the morning of June 2. He has endured them before, and they weren’t pretty.

“Late-night hosts have to go through the spanking machine,” he said. “If you showed me footage of me in 1994, it’s the same person, but I haven’t figured out how to be myself on television, which is a very tricky thing to do. You’re dealing with 30 time cues, lights, audience, a million different things, running traffic. It’s not that you learn to be funny, you learn to be the same person you were all along. It’s like a ‘Wizard of Oz’ thing.”